FEMA director disappointed with Katrina ruling

Published 6:30 am, Thursday, November 30, 2006

WASHINGTON — The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said today he was disappointed that a judge, in a sharply critical ruling, ordered the agency to resume housing aid to thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

Paulison said he thought the agency handled the situation correctly. "We used the same forms that we have used for decades," he said.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the federal government to resume paying rent and make three months of retroactive payments for about 2,600 hurricane evacuee households in Houston and thousands more across the country.

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U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said that FEMA had not sufficiently explained why it cut off the payments this year.

FEMA must not only resume the payments, it must "pay to each of these evacuees the short-term assistance benefits they would have otherwise received from September 1, 2006, through November 30, 2006," Leon wrote.

It was unclear, however, how the hurricane victims would get their money, because many of the families have scattered since losing assistance.

"It's going to be a challenge finding them," said Sue Sere, a Houston lawyer with Lone Star Legal Aid, a service for the poor that has worked with evacuees.

Leaders of the Houston chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which filed the lawsuit, said they would spread leaflets at complexes where the evacuees lived, call phone numbers in the group's records and take other steps to find the evacuees who could benefit.

About 11,000 evacuee households are covered by the ruling, said Ginny Goldman, ACORN's head organizer in Texas. "This is a substantial amount of money," she said. "We are talking many millions of dollars."

Most of the affected evacuees are in Texas, with "the larger part living now in Houston," Goldman said.

'Finally something good'

One is
Wanda Jones
, 49, from the New Orleans area. She came to Houston with her elderly father during Hurricane Katrina.

"This is wonderful news," she said. "We are feeling good that finally something good has happened for us."

Some of the FEMA aid has gone to Hurricane Rita victims.

Jones said she moved into an apartment in southwest Houston soon after the storm and was paying her rent with FEMA aid until it was cut off in April.

"I just got a letter saying I wasn't eligible anymore, but it didn't give me a reason," she said.

Since then, she has paid rent with earnings from a job and money left from a FEMA payout for the loss of her possessions in Louisiana, she said.

Jones said her job ended in May and she doesn't have money to pay her rent, which is due next week.

She said she hopes the decision will help her avoid eviction.

Letters called confusing

FEMA spokesman
Aaron Walker
denied that the agency had improperly ended the payments.

"FEMA's emergency sheltering initiative was conceived as a compassionate but short-term solution to shelter evacuees," Walker said. "By law, sheltering assistance can be provided for only a limited period of time."

Walker said not everyone was eligible for long-term rental assistance. He said they were informed that they were being cut off and given 60 days to appeal.

But the judge agreed with those bringing the lawsuit that letters sent to those denied further benefits were "vague and uninformative" and often gave contradictory information.

The judge's decision came in the form of a preliminary injunction. It permits those whose payments were ended to appeal FEMA's action and requires FEMA to make payments while the appeals are pending.

"In essence, each additional day plaintiffs go without assistance, they are harmed further," Leon said.

The judge also ordered FEMA to better explain why the payments stopped.

2,600 households dropped

In the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, FEMA began paying rent and utilities for evacuees through programs administered by local governments. At its height, Houston's Joint Hurricane Housing Task Force housed about 34,000 households.

In February, FEMA began shifting evacuees into a separate housing program that pays rent but not utilities and has tighter eligibility rules. Ultimately, the agency decided about 2,600 Houston households were ineligible for that program. Those families received their last rent payments in August.

ACORN's lawsuit, filed in August, echoed complaints by Mayor Bill White and others in Houston that FEMA's notification procedures were so confusing that evacuees had no basis on which to appeal or correct the problems that led to denial of aid.

"This ruling is a victory for thousands of our fellow citizens who have done everything within their power to put the pieces of their lives back together," ACORN President Maude Hurd said. "Americans are compassionate people, and we want to see Katrina survivors get help to rebuild their homes, lives and communities, not the runaround from the government."

FEMA has the option of continuing to defend its position in the case despite the temporary injunction. But Leon said he thinks the evacuees "are highly likely to succeed on the merits" if the case goes forward.